Open Source Innovation

Nexedi tries to stay on the forefront of information technology by putting strong emphasis on research and innovation. We are continuously investing in open source research together with partner companies and academic institutions and have many software products originating from former research projects. Key topics of interest include business intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, distributed web and data storages. Nexedi's own innovations, such as the Unified Business Model (UBM) or the ERP5 Implementation Process lie at the core of our solutions and business practices and have been both researched extensively and academically published.

Research Partners

Conducting joint research and development with partners has shown to be a key success factor for our open source projects. Some partners have been working with us for many years even contributing additional modules to ERP5 (such as ERP5 eGov) while others are involved in reasearching and creating technologies embedded in many of Nexedis solutions.

Mines Télécom

Hangzhou Dianzi University

Université Paris 13

Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6

AIDE - Agence de l'informatique de l'etat

Instituto Federal de Educação

Innovations & Publications

Nexedi's research projects and cooperations with academic institutions have lead to a growing list of scientific publications. Articles, papers and book chapters related to Nexedi technologies have been published by IEEE, IFIP and ACM among others.

One Student One ERP

The One Student One ERP (OSOE) is a program providing every student and researcher of involved partner institutions a dedicated ERP system with Customer Relation Management (CRM), Document/Knowledge Management (KM) and an online development environment to teach management science, learn how to configure an ERP system and provide a testbed for innovative research.

With OSOE, Nexedi tries to contibute to the progress of Management Science by creating mutual collaborations with academic research and education while at the same time advancing teaching of ERP related topics towards Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).

The Unified Business Model (UBM) is an abstract business model made up of only five generic concepts (Node, Movement, Resource, Item, Path) to express business related processes. It is the architecture of the core system of ERP5 and all extensions (hence the name ERP5) and provides a unified, business-independent vocabulary within a simple and compact data model to guarantee ease of access for engineers as well as consistency across all modules of ERP5.

In 2003 Nexedi developed a device that once hooked up to a televion would convert and stream the TV programs online, so they could be viewed from any computer around the world. A second device for playing content streamed online on a regular TV complemented the set.

The first implementation using solely SaaS and PaaS components also resulted in ERP5 being the first fully free SaaS-based ERP system, a pre-configured, ready-to-use ERP specifically tailored ot small and medium enterprises.

A positive side effect of ERP5's generic architecture is the fact, that all implementations more or less followed the same routines. These routines where eventually formalized and fixed into what has become the "ERP5 Standard Implementation Process" - a generic process for implementing ERP5 across any business field resulting in much lower implementation cost.

Nexedi created SlapOS in 2010. SlapOS is an open source grid operating system for distributed cloud computing based on the motto "Everything is a process". It is also the first practical implementation of a general purpose edge computing system. SlapOS opens new perspectives for both business and research in the area of resilience and security on the Cloud.

In 2013, Nexedi created the the ERP5 Artificial intelligence Toolkit (EAT) - a prototype consisting of a set of ERP5 modules which allow to manage and evaluate configuration questions, design decision trees and collect answer data as input for learning classifiers.

In 2013, Nexedi created a resilient network overlay that solves the growing problem of poor connectivity of modern Internet by generating a self-evolving random mesh of tunnels. re6st unifies radio mesh and wired mesh by providing low latency routing. It was also the first commercial application of babel protocol (RFC 6126).

For Wendelin, the Big Data platform of Nexedi, a distributed memory manager was prototyped and is currently under developement. It allows to go beyond the physical memory/RAM limitations enabling true out-of-core data processing.

Nexedi invented "Free Web" in the form of self modifiable HTML5 offline applications that turn any user into a developer in one click without requiring to install a local development environment. This can be viewed as the invention of the HTML5 working copy.

The project aim is to develop the next generation of open source knowledge based, business collaboration platform, dubbable the "virtual office of the future", which should be distributable on a Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) basis

Linagora

Nexedi

XWiki

Loria laboratory at Université de Lorraine

LIX laboratory at École Polytechnique

2015 - ongoing

WINDELIN

The project will research and develop a pre-commercial Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) solution specialized on decentralized data collection and storage and the application of machine learning to predict failure propabilities of wind turbines. Data is to be collected through novel smart sensors (IoT - Internet of Things) set up and managed via a distributed mesh cloud.

The aim of Wendelin is to develop an industrial Big Data solution "Made in France" based on open source software components along with two prototype applications for the automotive and green energy sectors.

RINA, the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture, is an emerging clean-slate programmable networking approach, centring on Inter-Process Communication (IPC) paradigm. This project's aim design, develop and implement the innovative internals of this clean-slate architecture that include the programmable functions to be used in security of content and application processes, supporting QoS and congestion control in aggregated levels, providing protection and resilience, facilitating more efficient topological routing, and multi-layer management for handling configuration, performance and security and demonstrate the applicability and benefits in use-cases driven be end-users, service providers and equipment vendors.

The project's aim is to engineer a semantic free open source simulation application development platform to support the wider adoption of simulation based applications in European manufactoring companies. The platform should use discrete event simulation technology ("task allocation simulation") beyond the current state of the art and aid companies in strategic (product/process development), tactical (ERP decision level) manufacturing execution (MES level) providing reactive real time decision support.